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23Response to Amy Olberding, "Philosophical Exclusion and Conversational Practices"Philosophy East and West 67 (4): 1038-1044. 2017.A full third of the book is devoted to "Buddhist themes," and although I am unfortunately unqualified to comment on its exegetical and interpretative quality, I can report that I found the discussion fascinating and enlightening. Priest gives us clear, precise, technical, and philosophically sophisticated theorizing based around these thinkers, giving the lie to the not-uncommon trope among analytic philosophers that so-called "continental" and Eastern thought are inherently wooly, without rigor…Read more
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22Insiders and outsiders in seventeenth-century philosophyNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews. forthcoming.
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21"Sophie de Grouchy, The Tradition(s) of Two Liberties, and the Missing Mother(s) of Liberalism"In Jacqueline Broad & Karen Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 109-122. 2017.This chapter demonstrates how Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822) anticipates the famous modern-day distinction between positive and negative liberty in her late eighteenth-century writings. It is argued that, on these grounds, De Grouchy deserves a rightful place in the history of the liberal tradition, a tradition that is typically depicted as the exclusive province of men. To support this claim, this chapter examines De Grouchy’s ideas in comparison with Rousseau’s and Adam Smith’s views on justice…Read more
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20Private epistemic virtue, public vices: moral responsibility in the policy sciencesExperts and Consensus in Social Science 50 275-295. 2014.In this chapter we address what we call “The-Everybody-Did-It” (TEDI) Syndrome, a symptom for collective negligence. Our main thesis is that the character of scientific communities can be evaluated morally and be found wanting in terms of moral responsibility. Even an epistemically successful scientific community can be morally responsible for consequences that were unforeseen by it and its members and that follow from policy advice given by its individual members. We motivate our account by a c…Read more
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20Review Essay of Levy, Neil. Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022 forthcoming in International Studies in the Philosophy of ScienceInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.This is a Review Essay of Neil Levy's Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022 forthcoming in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science. After summarizing the book it focuses on methodological and political issues pertaining to his synthetic philosophy and regulative epistemology.
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19Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public ThinkerOup Usa. 2017.Adam Smith was a famous economist and moral philosopher. This book treats Smith also as a systematic philosopher with a distinct epistemology, an original theory of the passions, and a surprising philosophy mind. The book argues that there is a close, moral connection between Smith's systematic thought and his policy recommendations.
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19Neglected classics of philosophyOxford University Press. 2022.In this introduction I use Bertrand Russell's (1945) The History of Western Philosophy (hereafter: History), to introduce the meta-philosophical themes that recur throughout the chapters of this book. In particular, I focus on the way the distinction or opposition between rustic thought, which is supposed to characterize barbarous societies, and the urbane thought that is purported to characterize civilized society can help explain some entrenched patterns of exclusion visible in contemporary ph…Read more
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18Without God: gravity as a relational quality of matter in Newton's treatiseIn Dana Jalobeanu & Peter R. Anstey (eds.), Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion: Descartes and Beyond, Routledge. pp. 13--80. 2011.
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15Four Methods of Empirical Inquiry in the Aftermath of Newton’s ChallengeIn Anne-Lise Rey & Siegfried Bodenmann (eds.), What Does It Mean to Be an Empiricist?: Empiricisms in Eighteenth Century Sciences, Springer Verlag. pp. 15-30. 2018.In this paper I distinguish four methods of empirical inquiry in eighteenth century natural philosophy. In particular, I distinguish among what I call, the mathematical-experimental method; the method of experimental series; the method of inspecting ideas; the method of natural history. While such a list is not exhaustive of the methods of inquiry available, even so, focusing on these four methods will help in diagnosing a set of debates within what has come to be known as ‘empiricism’; througho…Read more
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15New Voices on Adam Smith (edited book)Routledge. 2006.n recent years, there has been a resurgence of academic interest in Adam Smith. As a consequence, a large number of PhD dissertations on Smith have been written by international scholars - in different languages, and in many diverse disciplines, including economics, women’s studies, philosophy, science studies, political theory and english literature: diversity which has enriched the area of study. In response to this activity, and in order to making these contributions more easily accessible t…Read more
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14Teaching Comparative History of Political PhilosophyIn Amber L. Griffioen & Marius Backmann (eds.), Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past: New Reflections in the History of Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 163-178. 2023.The main aim of this chapter is to provide a conceptual framework that makes a genuinely comparative survey of the history of political theory/philosophy [hereafter HOP] possible. At present, in political science and philosophy departments, there are survey courses in HOP that cover, roughly, works from Plato to Max Weber. Such courses, and the survey works, they rely upon are generally Eurocentric and mostly male dominated. This chapter discusses two kinds of obstacles to developing a comparati…Read more
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13Philosophy and its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2013.This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to…Read more
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13Philosophy of Science as First Philosophy: The Liberal Polemics of Ernest NagelIn Matthias Neuber & Adam Tamas Tuboly (eds.), Ernest Nagel: Philosophy of Science and the Fight for Clarity, Springer. pp. 233-253. 2021.This chapter explores Nagel’s polemics. It shows these have a two-fold character: to defend liberal civilization against all kinds of enemies. And to defend what he calls ‘contextual naturalism.’ And the chapter shows that reinforce each other and undermine alternative political and philosophical programs. The chapter’s argument responds to an influential argument by George Reisch that Nagel’s professional stance represents a kind of disciplinary retreat from politics. In order to respond to Rei…Read more
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11Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Volume 2 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2022."In this introduction I use Bertrand Russell's (1945) The History of Western Philosophy (hereafter: History), to introduce the meta-philosophical themes that recur throughout the chapters of this book. In particular, I focus on the way the distinction or opposition between rustic thought, which is supposed to characterize barbarous societies, and the urbane thought that is purported to characterize civilized society can help explain some entrenched patterns of exclusion visible in contemporary p…Read more
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11Spinoza and EconomicsIn Yitzhak Y. Melamed (ed.), A Companion to Spinoza, Wiley. 2021.Spinoza's more fundamental criticism is that the open‐ended pursuit of wealth is a species of madness. This chapter focuses on Spinoza's intervention in the debate over luxury – a topic central to early modern debates over the new economy. It argues that Spinoza's diagnosis of the problem of luxury and corruption is important to his political philosophy. In the early modern period, the debate over the political dangers of luxury was re‐opened. Spinoza addresses the question of luxury and corrupt…Read more
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11“Every System of Scientific Theory Involves Philosophical Assumptions”(Talcott Parsons). The Surprising Weberian Roots to Milton Friedman's MethodologyIn Dennis Dieks, Wenceslao Gonzalo, Thomas Uebel, Stephan Hartmann & Marcel Weber (eds.), Explanation, Prediction, and Confirmation, Springer. pp. 533--543. 2011.
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11SmithRoutledge. 2014.Adam Smith is rediscovered every few generations by philosophers surprised by his subtlety, originality, and relevance. Smith’s status as mythical father of economic science and his role as canonical defender of free trade is secure within economics, but few philosophers have been more often misrepresented and underestimated. Because he is well known as an advocate of commercial society, many scholars, public intellectuals, commentators, and journalists are happy to implicate him automatically i…Read more
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9The Oxford Handbook of Newton (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please …Read more
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9Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2016.What makes for a philosophical classic? Why do some philosophical works persist over time, while others do not? The philosophical canon and diversity are topics of major debate today. This stimulating volume contains ten new essays by accomplished philosophers writing passionately about works in the history of philosophy that they feel were unjustly neglected or ignored-and why they deserve greater attention. The essays cover lesser known works by famous thinkers as well as works that were once …Read more
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6Counterfactual Causal Reasoning in Smithian SympathyRevue Internationale de Philosophie 269 (3): 307-316. 2014.This paper argues that according to Adam Smith the workings of (anything but extremely simple) sympathetic judgment (s) presuppose and crucially depend on counterfactual causal reasoning in the sympathetic process. In particular it argues for four related claims: (i) that according to Smith that the sympathetic process depends on a type of causal reasoning that goes well beyond the kind of simulationist theory standardly attributed to him; (ii) that the Smithian imagination in the sympathetic pr…Read more
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5Correction to: Teaching Comparative History of Political PhilosophyIn Amber L. Griffioen & Marius Backmann (eds.), Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past: New Reflections in the History of Philosophy, Springer Verlag. 2023.Owing to an oversight incorrect acknowledgement text was published in this chapter. The correct acknowledgement text has been updated.
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Wijsbegeerte tussen wetenschap en moraal in een post-Newtoniaanse wereld: Berkeley, Hume en Adam SmithAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 100 (3): 244-246. 2008.
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Areas of Interest
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